Education seemed to be on everyone’s mind in the start of 2015 as two of the most powerful men in the world were talking about Education. The first impression came on January 20, 2015 as the President of the United States Barack Obama addressed Higher education as the most important pillar of modern knowledge economy in his sixth SOTU address. The second voice was that of the richest man in the World, Bill Gates (and his wife Melinda Gates) who placed his bets on Online Education to bring an unprecedented global revolution. Co-incidentally both called education as the best tool to for providing equal opportunity to every American kid, enhancing the opportunity baskets and reducing inequality in the society. The benefits of both plans are set to reap returns from education today by 2030.

For the POTUS the endurance of hardworking Americans had reclaimed the economy from the clutches of sub-prime crisis. Higher education seemed to have played a key role in recapturing a doomed economy and setting it on the path of economic growth with “shrinking deficits, bustling industry, and booming energy production”. And that’s when the President called upon the fellow American to aide him in materialising his (budgetary) vision for the next fifteen years.

Mr President posited that 2 out of 3 jobs will require some demand some sort of Higher Education by 2020. Obama, thus, re-iterated his America’s College Promise proposal that will provide two years of free community college education for willing students in America. The beneficiaries will be able to achieve an Associate degree for virtually zero tuition payment, provided they enrol on half-time basis and maintain a GPA of at least 2.5. The community colleges are an important education institutions for many lesser-earning and middle class family students. Also community colleges are the learning avenues for employed personnel who wish to upgrade their educational skills for keeping pace with the dynamics of job markets as well as many veterans willing to enter job markets. With all hopes, President’s promise is set to provide relief and hope to many middle class families and will help them to achieve higher future earnings and dream careers without break-back student loans. However, there are a variety of things amiss.

The following article is adapted from David Noble’s new book, Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education, just published by Monthly Review Press. Noble, a professor at York University, should need no introduction to MR readers. For the past three decades he has established himself as one of the great scholars and historians of technology, demystifying the subject and placing technology in the necessary social and political economic context. His publications include America by Design: Science, Technology, and The Rise of Corporate Capitalism (1977), Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation (1984), and The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and The Spirit of Invention (1997, all published by Alfred A. Knopf).

For nearly all of that time, Noble has been a critic of the “business-model” of higher education in the United States, an effort to subject learning to marketing practices, bottom-line return on investment, and capital accumulation, without regard to the demands of learning and scholarship. As Noble points out, the use of these techniques are all too widespread in this country’s universities. These days they feature prominently in the push for “distance education,” Noble’s critique of which is central to this article and to the argument in his book.

On the basis of his scholarly accomplishments, a search committee selected Noble in 2001 to be appointed to the endowed Woodsworth Professorship in the Humanities at Simon Fraser University. In violation of every academic norm, the administration is blocking the appointment, presumably on political grounds. Noble’s criticism of online education and the corporatization of academia in Digital Diploma Mills brings together and crystallizes his pacesetting work in this area.

—The Editors

All discussion of distance education these days invariably turns into a discussion of technology, an endless meditation on the wonders of computer-mediated instruction. Identified with a revolution in technology, distance education has thereby assumed the aura of innovation and the appearance of a revolution itself, a bold departure from tradition, a signal step toward a preordained and radically transformed higher educational future. In the face of such a seemingly inexorable technology-driven destiny and the seductive enchantment of technological transcendence, skeptics are silenced and all questions are begged. But we pay a price for this technological fetishism, which so dominates and delimits discussion. For it prevents us from perceiving the more fundamental significance of today’s drive for distance education, which, at bottom, is not really about technology, nor is it anything new. We have been here before.